22 f.

7 'Then shall ye begin to say, We did eat and drink in Thy presence, and Thou didst teach in our streets. And He shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are: depart from Me, all ye workers of unrighteousness.' It is usually argued that in comparison with Matt. 722 f. this must be the more accurate version of Jesus' words. He is speaking to His contemporaries, and when He is represented for He is of course the oixodeonórys of the parable as saying to them at last, I do not know you (Luke 1325), it is easy to imagine their astonished remonstrance: 'Not know us! Why, we ate and drank with you, and it was in our streets you taught.' In comparison with this, Matthew's version reads much more like a preacher's application of the words of Jesus in the apostolic age, and with its experiences in view, than like a precise report of what Jesus said. There was no such thing as prophesying in the name of Jesus till after Pentecost, and the words which Matthew puts into the lips of Jesus would not have been intelligible to any one when the Sermon on the Mount was spoken. No one then had seen or could anticipate prophesying, casting out devils, and working miracles, by the name of Jesus. But while this is so, the application which the evangelist makes to his contemporaries in the apostolic church-as though Jesus were speaking to them, and not to His own contemporaries in His lifetime— of the words which Jesus actually used, is quite legitimate; it does not in the least misrepresent the mind of Jesus. In Matthew and in Luke alike—in the simpler form of words which is strictly appropriate to the lips of Jesus Himself (Luke 13 26 f.), and in the more ample and rhetorical one in which the evangelist (speaking in the same spirit as Paul in 1 Cor. 1313) strives to bring home the moral import of them to the conscience of the next generation-the attitude of Tesus is the same. It is His ac

ceptance or rejection of men on which their final destiny depends. It is His voice by which they are admitted to or excluded from the Kingdom of God. Not that this is done arbitrarily; the very purpose of these solemn utterances is to show that there is nothing arbitrary in it. No formal recognition of Jesus, no casual acquaintance with Him, can be regarded as a substitute for doing what He says (Luke 6 46), or doing the will of His Father in heaven (Matt. 7 21). But in both gospels alike, and in a source which their very divergences at this point show to lie far behind them both, it is He who pronounces on the value of every human life. It is the consciousness that the Speaker is nothing less than the final Judge of all which makes the parable of the builders on the rock and the sand, with which the Sermon closes, the most solemn and overpowering of all the words of Jesus.

The place of Christ as Judge, a place which He has held in Christian faith from the beginning, is often presented in another light. It is regarded as a formal piece of theology, with no support in the mind of Jesus. When men came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, they attached to Him (it is said) all the traditional Messianic predicates, and among others this, that when He came in His Messianic power He would come as Judge;1 but the transference of these predicates to Jesus was a purely formal consequence of regarding Him as the Messiah; it was a historical accident, due to a peculiarity of the Messianic dogmatic; there is nothing vital in it, nothing which is due to Jesus Himself. There could not possibly be a more complete misconception or misrepresentation of the facts with which we have to deal in this connexion. What

How far this is true in point of fact is rather doubtful; in the Old Testament it is always God who is Judge, not the Messiah, and it is not clear that in the New Testament period the function had been transferred from God to His Anointed. See Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, c. xiii.

ever is formal in the New Testament, the belief in Jesus as Judge is not. It is a belief which may be clothed here and there in forms which Jewish theology supplied to the imagination, but it rests on personal experiences and on the sense of Jesus' attitude to men. Whatever else happened to men in the presence of Jesus, they were judged. They knew they were. They had experiences which prompted such utterances as Luke 5: Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord; or John 429: Come, see a man that told me all things that ever I did. Such experiences furnished them with irresistible evidence that this wonderful Person might be the Christ; they were not idle deductions from the fact that He was the Christ. It was impossible not to generalise them, and to realise that with everything else that Jesus might be to men, He was also their Judge. He Himself, it may be said, generalised them, or realised in His own mind all that they involved. Not to speak meanwhile of passages in which He tells of the coming of the Son of Man and of the judgment attendant upon it (e.g. Matt. 16 27, 25 31-48), we have in the Sermon on the Mount, when every allowance has been made which historical criticism can demand, a revelation of the mind of Jesus and of His attitude to men, which covers all that is meant by calling Him their final Judge. Resting as it does on the oldest of evangelic records, the source which lies behind the first and third gospels, and at an important point very far behind them, this revelation brings us as close to Jesus as we can historically be brought. It is not the witness of apostolic faith to which it introduces us, but the witness of Jesus to Himself. It is no exaggeration to say that it may be summed up in the solemn words of James (412): One only is the Lawgiver and Judge, and that One He with whom we are confronted here.

i

THE HEALING OF THE CENTURION'S SERVANT

(Matt. 85-13, Luke 7 1-10, 13 28-30)

In Luke the Sermon on the Mount is followed immediately by the account of Jesus' return to Capernaum, and the healing there of a centurion's servant. The same incident is recorded in Matt. 85-13, and comparison of Luke 7 with Matt. 7 28, 85, makes it more than probable that the sequence here indicated goes back to the common source.' We have this early authority, therefore, for one of the healing miracles, and in spite of the notable variation of the evangelists with regard to the centurion's mode of approaching Jesus, there is an even more notable agreement-it virtually amounts to identity—in their report both of the officers' words and of Jesus' reply. 'Sir, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my boy shall be healed. For I also am a man under authority, having under myself soldiers, and I say to one Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it' (Matt. 8 8 f., Luke 7 6 ff.). The centurion evidently believed that Jesus had at His disposal spiritual messengers who could execute His commands, just as he himself had soldiers and slaves, and that therefore His personal presence was not essential to the carrying out of His will. We do not need to accept his interpretation of the way in which Jesus exercised His power: the point is that Jesus enthusiastically welcomed and approved his attitude. 'When He heard, He marvelled and said to those who followed, Verily I say unto you, not even in Israel have I found

1 So Harnack, Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 54, who says it follows 'with certainty that great parts of the Sermon stood together in Q and were followed by this narrative.' Allen, Commentary on St. Matthew, p. 79, doubts this because of the remarkable differences between Matthew and Luke.

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such faith.' We see here that Jesus wanted to find faith, and we see also what faith is. It is that attitude of the soul to Jesus which is confident that the saving help of God is present in Him, and that there is no limit to what it can do. It has become a commonplace to point out that whereas in the theological books of the New Testament Jesus Himself is the object of faith, in the synoptic gospels, which are truer to history, this is never the case. The only case in the synoptics in which Jesus speaks of men believing on Himself is Matt. 18" (these little ones who believe on Me), and in the parallel passage in Mark 92 the decisive words 'on Me' are wanting. Faith in the synoptics, it is argued that is, faith as it was understood and required by Jesus-is always faith in God. In this there is both truth and error. God is undoubtedly the only and the ultimate object of faith, but what the synoptic gospels in point of fact present to us on this and many other occasions is (to borrow the language of 1 Peter 121) the spectacle of men who believe in God through Him. Their faith is their assurance that God's saving power is there, in Jesus, for the relief of their needs. Such faith Jesus demands as the condition upon which God's help becomes effective; and the more ardent and unqualified it is the more joyfully is it welcomed. The faith in Christ which is illustrated in the epistles is in essence the same thing. It has no doubt other needs and blessings in view than those which are uppermost in the synoptics, but as an attitude to Jesus it is identical with that which is there called by the same name. It will be more convenient to examine this subject further when we come to look at the self-revelation of Jesus in Mark, for there the narratives of the 'mighty works' bring it to the front: but it seemed worth while to emphasise here, in connexion with a miracle recorded in the oldest evangelic